At the brilliant suggestion of Amy Kenyon, I did some testing of using Prezi as a recording tool for one of our courses in production. It’s pretty great for zooming around large images at will and discussing the various parts allowing the instructor to control the zoom. For our use, we needed to speak about a large spreadsheet, but not needing to interact with it. I can imagine this could be good for large architectural images or artwork or maps. This movie took less than 5 minutes to make.
Here’s the workflow:
- Copy the range of cells you want to show in your Excel file
- Create a new document in Photoshop and paste (haven’t tested other graphic editing programs but they might work)
- Save the file as a JPG or PNG
- Create your Prezi presentation (free accounts are available for students/teachers) http://www.prezi.com
- Use the “Invisible Box” feature to create your zoom points
- Go full screen and present
- Record with your favorite screen recording tool. I used QuickTime X for this but of course Camtasia would work just as well.
The prezi zoom in/zoom out are nicely executed with ease in and ease out and are controlled by the arrow keys just like you’d advance a slide deck.
